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Math’s most prestigious prizes were announced today at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Following a lively brass-band performance by the West Philadelphia Orchestra in a massive auditorium at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, the president of the International Mathematical Union bestowed the prizes to four mathematicians for work ranging from the theory of knots to the motion of fluids.

The Fields Medals went to Hong Wang of New York University and France’s Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES), Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.

In the awards’ 90-year history, Wang is only the third woman to win one, after mathematicians Maryam Mirzakhani and Maryna Viazovska in 2014 and 2022, respectively. Wang and Deng represent the prizes’ only Chinese-born recipients besides mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, who won a Fields Medal in 1982.

The awards, often referred to as math’s Nobel Prizes, are named for John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician who led the push for their creation in the 1920s as a way to bring the international math community together. But unlike the Nobels, they are only bestowed every four years and, starting in 1966, only go to researchers who are less than 40 years old.

Hong Wang

When Wang rose to speak during a symposium at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., this past February, she opened with a characteristic note of humility. “Thank you for having me; it’s a great honor,” she said. “Especially when I saw the speaker list, I thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t speak.’”

But no one in the rapt audience shared Wang’s opinion. At age 34, her work at the interface of two mathematical fields—taking collections of wavelike equations and using them to explore how shapes fill space—had already transformed both subjects. In particular, a 2025 proof of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture that she co-authored with mathematician Joshua Zahl marked a triumphant end to what had been a fervent, field-defining 50-year search.

Now Wang possesses the ultimate qualification for any list of mathematical greats: a Fields Medal.

The Kakeya conjecture is the answer to a mathematical game: swirl your pencil around in the air so that it points in every direction exactly once while also swiveling it through as little space as possible. Wang and Zahl proved a fundamental limit to how small that space can possibly be.

“She solved the ‘holy grail’ problem,” says Nets Katz, a mathematician at Rice University, adding that this is only one of the accomplishments that “has made her a central figure” in the area. Wang’s Fields Medal, he says, “is well deserved.”

Wang remembers being excited when Mirzakhani became the first woman to win a Fields medal in 2014. But like it was for the late Mirzakhani, who was a reticent public figure, this aspect of the achievement is somewhat secondary to Wang. “I didn’t think too much about it,” she says.

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